ABSTRACT This paper examines whether government favoritism in public procurement generates negative social costs, even within redistributive institutional frameworks such as the European Union. Rather than relying on perception‐based corruption indicators, we employ an objective proxy of corruption risk—the share of awarded public contracts which received only one bid. This measure captures non‐competitive allocation and mitigates reverse causality concerns. Using static and dynamic fixed effects panel models, we find that procurement favoritism is systematically associated with adverse social outcomes across EU member states. Specifically, we document robust, statistically significant negative effects on educational attainment, income inequality, and poverty. Our results suggest that governance quality—and not merely the volume of public expenditure—is a critical determinant of social development, and that distortions in procurement processes can undermine the effectiveness of public spending even where formal cohesion commitments exist.
ABSTRACT From the perspective of negotiated governance, this study examines how companies respond to regulatory measures that combine hard and soft elements, assigning them greater responsibility for addressing social problems. Focusing on the Swedish gambling market, the study analyzes gambling operators' interpretation of the legal concept of duty of care. While this duty obliges operators to protect gamblers from excessive gambling, what it entails in practice and how responsibilities are understood are largely left to operators to define. Guided by the concept of responsibility, the analysis shows that interpretations vary and it is unclear what duty of care aims to prevent. Despite variations, duty of care is often framed in terms of responsible gambling, thereby individualizing responsibility for gambling‐related harm, and the action plans largely describe compliance with other legal requirements. In conclusion, the findings suggest a need for greater regulatory clarity regarding the normative foundations of duty of care regulation.
ABSTRACT Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS)—such as Fairtrade International and the Forest Stewardship Council—aim to improve sustainability in global supply chains by setting high social and environmental standards and certifying businesses that adopt them. This article examines why some VSS adopt ambitious goals for living wages or living incomes yet continue to certify businesses that only pay a minimum wage. Drawing on previous literature, it offers a typology of five ways that VSS can decouple. Drawing on documents, interviews, and participant observation, it offers detailed case studies of how five VSS have engaged in the coupling and decoupling of wage standards. The research identifies four drivers of decoupling: priorities that complete, costs of coupling, low risk of decoupling, and anticipation that coupling will be easier in the future. It also describes several factors that influence these drivers. Finally, it shows how decoupling may paradoxically facilitate progress, while pressure to fully couple may inhibit transformative change, and concludes with recommendations for avoiding empty claims while harnessing aspirational standards.
When and how do international standards influence domestic policies? The literature identifies a range of ways international standards may relate to domestic regulations-including by exporting, substituting, supplanting, or bolstering national rules-creating theoretical ambiguity. This article focuses, in particular, on whether, when, and how standards can help generate regulatory outcomes that are more rigorous than would otherwise be expected, given a jurisdiction's political economy. We define policy rigor to include both how substantively significant a policy is for regulated entities and also how stringently it is enforced. Positing a coherent international standards landscape in a given policy area as a key enabling condition, we highlight four mechanisms through which standards can increase policy rigor. Learning occurs when domestic actors, facing uncertainty, rely on international standards to understand how to achieve their goals. Normative benchmarking sees domestic actors using these standards as legitimate guides. Agenda-setting elevates the prominence of certain policy outcomes, aligning domestic coalitions around these standards. Harmonization happens when firms advocate for international standards to minimize multinational compliance costs and ensure a level playing field. To probe the plausibility of these mechanisms, our empirical analysis contrasts rules around climate-related disclosure and rules on carbon credits in five major economies with vastly different political economies around climate policy: Brazil, China, the EU, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across these jurisdictions, domestic disclosure policies are increasingly rigorous, aided by a converging landscape of standards. Conversely, the fragmented carbon credits standards landscape limits these mechanisms, and greater variance in the rigor of domestic regulations is observed. The findings contribute to theoretical debates on the relationship between transnational governance and national rules, highlighting specific pathways through which international standards may serve as a "conveyor belt," bringing rigorous rules into domestic policy.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented surge in spending to combat the pandemic with widespread accusations of corruption. The magnitude, drivers, and trajectory of corruption across the pandemic response remain underexplored. This paper approximates the impacts of the pandemic on public procurement corruption risks and the mechanisms underpinning their persistence and diffusion. Administrative data on all high-value, regulated government tenders across Europe from 2016 to 2023 are analyzed. Fixed-effects regressions on the contract level estimate the impact of the pandemic-induced spending shock on corruption risks. We find that the COVID-19 spending surge was followed by sustained increases in corruption risks, particularly in medium-integrity countries. This is largely driven by market entrants without COVID-19-product experience exploiting weaker pandemic corruption controls to secure large contracts. We also find small spillover effects from corruption risks in COVID-19-related products to healthcare and wider procurement markets, driven by buyers normalizing emergency procurement practices beyond emergency contracts.
ABSTRACT Recent studies examine the conditions under which citizens in democracies are willing to endorse leaders who promote antidemocratic platforms. Less is known about the downstream ramifications of democratic backsliding on American citizens' attitudes and behaviors toward government. Specifically, no study has examined whether democratic backsliding affects citizens' willingness to engage with, collaborate with, and contribute to government. This article advances this research agenda by employing a conjoint experiment to assess the impact of state‐level democratic backsliding and elite polarization on Americans' attraction to state government employment among those who are actively seeking employment. Findings indicate that democratic backsliding, including political attacks on the state bureaucracy, alongside elite polarization, significantly and negatively affect job seekers' attraction to state government work. These findings suggest democratic backsliding and polarization repel potential job seekers, undermining the government's already limited capacity to compete with businesses over talent and its democratic resilience.
ABSTRACT The involvement of societal interests in the making of (statutory) legislation and regulation is an essential part of democratic governance and regulatory development. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the topic has been explored from various angles across the academic landscape. This systematic literature review explores the analytical dimensions and explanatory factors of interest group involvement in policy‐ and rulemaking processes. Drawing on 48 studies identified through the PRISMA statement, it reveals a fragmented yet converging field. While the literature often presents itself as anchored in one conceptual tradition, many contributions implicitly engage with various scholarly traditions. This engagement, albeit implicit, points to a latent convergence in the field that is not always made explicit in conceptual approaches, theoretical framing, or methodological design. Therefore, this review not only identifies gaps and connections in the field; it also highlights the potential for closer dialogue and mutual learning.
ABSTRACT This special issue demonstrates that regulatory studies and criminology both have virtue. Regulatory criminology has neglected virtues that exceed the sum of its parts. The editors did a splendid job of pointing out in their introduction that criminology created a number of theoretical traditions that have had moments of passing value and relevance to regulatory studies. In both fields, and at their intersections, one of these traditions, an economism of rational choice, even enjoyed periods of domination. At times, this narrowed scholarly imagination has won Nobel Prizes in economics. Today economists are less present at criminology, law and society, and regulation and governance conferences. Economists must be attracted back so that intellectual renewal on offer from regulatory studies and criminology might broaden their imaginations, and they ours. Regulation and governance can benefit greatly from noting how criminologists integrate insights from micro and macro levels by fine‐grained studies of the modus operandi of lawbreakers that are connected to a historical imagination for the longue durée and a sociological imagination of macrostructures.
Our research focuses on a French legal framework for corporate purpose that came into force with the 2019 Plan for Business Growth and Transformation law. The main differences with benefit corporations are that French law requires companies to be accountable by defining statutory environmental and social objectives, to take responsibility for achieving them through a mission committee, and to accept possible sanctions by an independent third-party body. However, the operationality, implementation, and governance mechanisms surrounding corporate purpose remain puzzling. To resolve this issue, we collected data and conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 investment companies. These companies play a central role in shaping corporate strategies through capital allocation and governance influence. Our findings enabled us to identify a governance model that aligns stakeholders around a purpose and leverages multiple accountability mechanisms for systemic impact.
Which candidates benefit from corruption and favoritism in public procurement? While existing studies show that politically connected firms profit from corruption risks in public procurement, we know less about whether these risks also increase the prevalence of political candidates with ties to business. This study suggests that pre-election corruption risks increase the prevalence of candidates with business ties, but that this relationship is highly contextual. Candidates with business ties have greater opportunities to benefit from favoritism and corruption in public contracting and may use these advantages to bolster their electoral base. However, when corruption reaches systemic levels, increases in pre-election corruption are less likely to affect the prevalence of candidates with business ties, since such ties are already deeply entrenched and collusive arrangements between business and politics are well established. We develop a new indicator of candidates' involvement in local companies-the Business-Politics Involvement (BPI) index-and use it to show that increases in pre-election corruption risks in public procurement are associated with a higher prevalence of candidates with business ties in the 2018 Italian election. Yet we also show that this association is largely driven by provinces in Northern Italy, while there is no such relationship in Southern Italy, where business ties are more common and corruption is systemic. Our findings suggest that contextual nuance is needed when interpreting single-bid procurement as evidence of corruption-particularly in systemically corrupt settings where pre-bid collusion is widespread. They also indicate the need for further research to better understand the nexus between business ties and corruption.
The field of regulation and governance has strong roots in criminological research. Foundational ideas about regulatory enforcement styles, root causes of compliance, and nongovernmental approaches to regulation and its enforcement have originated in criminological research. Over the last decades, however, criminology has been less explicitly present in the study of regulatory governance. This article, as an introduction to a special issue on the topic, discusses key theories, findings, and developments in criminological work's relevance to regulatory studies. It discusses how the criminological theory of capable guardianship offers a vital opportunity approach to understand and address regulatory violations. It shows the importance of longitudinal research in regulatory studies, highlighting how offending changes along the regulated business life cycle. Furthermore, it showcases how criminological research offers a new perspective on the organizational analysis of offending behaviors and the vitality of meso-level analysis within a broader macro context. And finally, it provides new avenues for enforcement and compliance research, including the study of defensive compliance practices and a compliance management approach to tackle police abuse.
With the development of generative Artificial Intelligence, the question of the nature of authorship in the copyright system has returned. Disillusioned with traditional answers based on the concept of copyright, we turn the tables and consider why we ask about authorship in the first place. In the following paper, we show that the real problem of machine creativity concerning copyright law is of epistemic origin (the attribution problem), why neither granting nor not granting copyright would solve this problem, and why it has actually been replaced within the academic discourse by a pseudo-problem. Finally, we propose an outline of a solution that goes beyond the scope of the current dispute: to reject the dogma that the author is inseparable from the copyright; to attribute works for epistemic, not only economic reasons; to (re)define machine authorship in copyright law through duties; and-going forward-to reconsider the role of the author as a legal concept.
We offer a systematic analysis of IMF loan conditionality on corruption and argue that the Fund's pursuit of anti-corruption measures is tempered by two political costs. First, because corruption is politically sensitive, the IMF risks destabilizing recipient governments and provoking crises. Second, these domestic risks translate into institutional costs: imposing such measures in strategically important countries (e.g., US allies or temporary UNSC members) can alienate key stakeholders. We posit that clear institutional guidelines reduce these institutional costs by aligning members and staff and promoting a more even application across the membership. We test these claims on a novel dataset of IMF loan conditions from 1980 to 2019, built with machine-learning tools that distinguish direct anti-corruption conditions from indirect ones aimed at accountability and transparency. The results strongly support the theory: following the IMF's 1997 corruption guidelines, the application of anti-corruption conditionality has become more even across multiple measures; yet, domestic political costs continued to steer the Fund toward indirect rather than direct conditions. Beyond illuminating how the IMF addresses a core impediment to development, the study highlights institutional evolution and how IOs balance competing pressures.
There is a global trend toward embedding personal credit systems and their scoring mechanisms within broader governance infrastructures. A prominent and controversial example is China's Social Credit System (SCS), which plays a central role in the country's data-driven financial and social governance. This study examines how Chinese citizens conceptualize "credit" and "social credit" and to what extent they engage with various personal credit systems, drawing on a large-scale survey (N = 5538). Our findings reveal a strong emphasis on the social attribute of both "credit" and "social credit," with respondents perceiving a close relationship between personal credit and reputation. This perception highlights the growing convergence of financial and reputational metrics. We observe significant variations across systems: participants are most engaged with commercial credit scoring systems, while they exhibit the least engagement with administrative credit rating systems. Notably, income emerges as a strong predictor of engagement, suggesting that wealthier individuals tend to engage more actively with personal credit rating systems and may derive more perceived benefits. This disparity raises the possibility of deepening financial and economic inequalities. By contextualizing China's experience within broader discussions of algorithmic regulation and data-driven financial systems, this study contributes to the ongoing discourse on digital inequality, algorithmic power, and financial stratification in non-Western contexts.
The aim of this research was to examine the effects of a cooperative and deterrent style, portrayed through regulatory letters, on motivation and compliance. Study 1 examined a general sample (N = 492) in an online experiment, to assess motivation and compliance-intentions. Study 2 focused on non-compliant financial service providers (N = 2803), assessing objective compliance in a field experiment. Both studies tested the impact of letters written in three different styles (i.e., neutral, cooperative, or deterrent), which did or did not include a procedural justice paragraph (resulting in six different letters). As hypothesized, the cooperative style as well as the deterrent style increased compliance (intentions), but results pointed to different motivational processes driving this effect. Whereas the cooperative style evoked internalized types of motivation through perceptions of a cooperative regulator, the deterrent style evoked external motivation and amotivation through perceptions of a deterrent regulator. In this context, procedural justice did not influence motivation or compliance (intentions). Thus, regulators that aim to stimulate internal motivation to comply, are advised to adopt a cooperative style when writing to regulatees.
This article explores the mechanisms through which institutional corruption and engagement in corruption at the societal level may be normalized to the extent that citizens adopt an instrumental approach to corruption. Such an approach means that the public accepts corrupt practices and sees them as reasonable, as long as they achieve results that they see as beneficial. We develop a theoretical framework that includes institutional and behavioral independent variables. We then test our research model using survey data collected from citizens of 27 European countries from Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer. The findings indicate that the mechanism through which citizens form their perceptions of institutional corruption as instrumental is complex. The normalization of corruption in society does not lead people to rule out process considerations, but it does weaken them among certain segments of the population. Thus, considerations about the outcomes of corrupt activities and the fairness of processes coexist.
Deterrence theory underpins numerous anti-corruption interventions. Yet, empirical evidence on its application to corruption remains limited. Existing studies rely mainly on laboratory experiments and focus on certainty and severity of punishment, leaving the role of celerity unexplored. This study addresses these gaps by examining the three elements of deterrence-certainty, severity, and celerity-using data from 25 European Union countries across five time periods (2013-2024), while controlling for a range of social, political, and economic factors, most notably trust. Mixed-effects analyses show that higher certainty of punishment is associated with lower corruption levels, but this relationship depends critically on celerity. When punishment is slow, certainty has no discernible association with corruption; when punishment is timely, this association is substantial. We found no evidence that laboratory-based severity effects extend to real-world corruption contexts. These findings indicate that effective deterrence strategies could prioritize measures that increase the perceived likelihood of punishment while simultaneously ensuring timely punishment. They also highlight the need for renewed theoretical and empirical attention to celerity as a conditional mechanism in deterrence processes.
Involvement of corporations in international crimes and conflict atrocities, such as crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, are neither isolated events nor uncommon. Importantly, corporate involvement in atrocity crimes is shaped by conditions in "zones of legal risk" (International Commission of Jurists), where gross human rights violations, atrocity crimes and extreme violence are pervasive. In this context, corporations become complicit in the most serious state crimes. The empirical study of 205 historical and contemporary cases across all global regions in a total of 36 countries explores patterns of involvement starting from the conceptual framework developed by the International Commission of Jurists. We identify six "risk profiles" of involvement defined by industry type, partners in such crimes, and the type of involvement and contribution to the crimes. Our results showcase the relationship between corporate characteristics and risks of involvement in serious violence for different risk profiles across space and time. Starting from a legal conceptual framework, we discuss how these results contribute to criminological theories of corporate crime, as well as to regulation theory and practice.
This paper examines whether e-procurement adoption is associated with procedural competition and transparency, two core components of procurement integrity. Using award-level microdata for Italian regional contracting authorities (2019-2023), we analyze a period preceding the legal obligation of full-cycle digital procurement, when the use of e-procurement tools remained discretionary across authorities. We construct three procedure-level indicators-notice-to-deadline length, single bidding, and ex-post outcome communication-and estimate pooled OLS, Probit, and Linear Probability models with extensive controls and robustness checks. We find that e-procurement adoption is differentially associated with these indicators across procedure types: it reduces single-bid outcomes in non-competitive procedures, while in competitive settings it lengthens submission periods and increases the likelihood of end-of-procedure communication. Although correlational, the results suggest that discretionary digitalization can reinforce procedural competition and disclosure practices through transparency and traceability gains.
The extent to which Regulatory Impact Assessments (RIAs) conform to the "ideal" rational decision-making model depends on factors such as political appropriation and the capacity of regulatory bodies. However, despite RIAs being embedded in bureaucratic settings, little research examines how the degree of formalization of RIA implementation affects their quality. In many contexts, RIAs are implemented within decision-making environments characterized by bureaucratization, where discretion is constrained by legalism, formal boundaries, and standardized processes. This study investigates how bureaucratization influences RIA quality and whether regulators socialized in more bureaucratized administrative cultures rely more heavily on standardized procedures than their peers, thereby affecting RIA quality. Drawing on evidence from Brazilian regulatory agencies that operate within a traditionally bureaucratized administrative system, we employ a mixed-methods design that combines OLS regression analysis with qualitative interviews. Our findings show that lower bureaucratization, operationalized as the use of strategic guidance documents that convey essential concepts and outline decision-making steps, is associated with higher-quality RIAs. By contrast, higher bureaucratization, characterized by the adoption of overly standardized templates, diminishes impact assessment quality. In addition, regulatory boards composed primarily of public sector professionals tend to adopt these templates more frequently, further reinforcing lower quality RIAs. Overall, the study contributes to research on the determinants of RIA quality and demonstrates how excessive bureaucratization can displace the intended goals of policy instruments.
